And just for the record: If you can get a majority to take away my rights, the next majority coming along might be after yours. Just sayin' ... that's not the liberty and justice for all we pledge allegience to. Sad day for North Carolina. In the words of +Barbara Harris, "Let there be peace among us and let us not be instruments of our own oppression.' La lucha continua!
2 comments:
You can't take away something from someone if they never had it in the first place.
Since supporters of redefining marriage to encompass same-sex couples often claim that they are in a civil rights struggle analagous to the right against racism, it's probably of value to examine how the latter was done. The fight for racial equality in this country started up well before the Civil War, of course, with protestors, advocates of abolition, etc. Then the whole thing came to a head when Lincoln was elected and there was a Civil War over the matter, as the South perceived that Lincoln's election would lead to permanent domination of the South by the North.
The key is that after the war was won by the North, the voters, flush with victory and persuaded of the rightness of the cause, supported Congress and the State legislatures in the passage of Constitutional Amendments that were intended to ensure that race could not be used as a basis to withhold basic rights that were otherwise guaranteed by the Constitution and by law. Most states complied, some did not (as you can see by the post-Reconstruction NC Constitutional Amendment you depicted). Subsequently, by both persuasion of the public and by court action, those Amendments overrode State action.
What has happened here is that the opponents of measures such as NC's recent action have not been able to persuade a sufficient number of the public to support their cause, so they have been attempting to bypass that step (the equivalent of passing the 14th and 15th Amendments and others, or of passing laws that have been seen in some States requiring the redefinition of marriage) and have resorted to attempting to get the courts to find support for their cause indirectly in existing law.
People don't like that. And they are reacting to it, which is why 30 or more States have now passed such amendments to their State Constitutions. In fact, I believe that there are now enough States that have passed either State Constitutional amendments or ordinary legislation banning the redefinition of marriage to support a Federal Constitutional amendment (you need 38 States to pass one). Maybe it's one or two short, I'm not sure.
For those of you who condemn the concept of States' rights, consider that without that concept no State would recognize a union of a same-sex couple as a marriage.
“You can't take away something from someone if they never had it in the first place.”
This exactly what Prop. 8 did in California.
“ . . . same-sex couples often claim that they are in a civil rights struggle . . .”
They claim it because they are. My wife and I, as heterosexuals, enjoy the protection of more than 1000 civil rights that some couples in my church are denied.
No one is attempting to redefine marriage. We are attempting to make it available to more people, just as granting the right to vote to women did not redefine voting but rather, created more voters.
Since yesterday we are once again hearing from the same Christian “love the sinner, hate the sin folks” telling the same lies. People will want to marry their dog or their toaster. AIDS is God’s plague sent to kill gays. Marriage has always been between one man and one woman (this from a Mormon, of all people). Christians don’t generally lie about the people they love.
Conservatives accuse those who support marriage equality of being guilty of political correctness, when the opposite is true. “Tradition” and “freedom of religion” are simply more palatable than the real reasons – ignorance, bigotry and homophobia.
We are all children of God. Why the conservative insistence that some of us are not? What is the conservative objection to “all men are created equal? What is the conservative objection to “liberty and justice for all?”
And once we put the LGBT community back in its place, once and for all, who is the next group whose rights will be put to a vote?
Post a Comment